Thanks shreader, ya im getting to the point of splitting my larger drive and doing the same thing, but i really dont want to install fresh operating systems as I love the way i have Vista set up now as well as my XP, i know its alot easy the other way just installing xp first on the partition then vista and it all takes care of itself but i would really like to keep my config the way it is now on 2 hard drives....any answer to the hardware setup would be appreciated. thanks

I wouldn't suggest changing the drive order as that will probably change which drive/partition is seen as the drive tagged "System" in Disk Management.

The same principles as at the top of the thread should work fine for you Skycatcher. It should be easy enough to change the boot.ini using notepad to create a new one if necessary and renaming the old one to boot.iniold or something like that.

The key is having all the boot system files for both operating systems on the drive/partition tagged "System" and then either running a startup repair by booting to the Vista DVD or by running a Vista Bootoader install with VistaBootPRO.

"The great majority of mankind are satisfied with appearances, as though they were realities, and are often more influenced by the things that seem than by those that are." - Niccolo Machiavelli

Well, Well, Well, what do ya know it worked,,major thanks to you Grav!ty I can finally fix the hole in the wall that ive been putting my head thorugh over tha last couple of weeks. Phew I need a nap!!.lol

this message is for gravity, have you figured out if a dual boot is possible with vista install being the system drive. I have a laptop with vista preinstalled on the system drive and i recently installed xp on a seperate drive that i had as the system drive temporarly. due to certain factors the xp drive can only be the second (not system) drive (no option in bios to switch) the drive only fits in the second drive bay and the vista install has to be the system drive. i can boot into vista without problems but when booting into xp i can't seem to point to the right device in boot.ini, i get an error that my hal.dll is missing or corrupted when i put this in boot.ini under [boot loader] default=multi(0)disk(0)rdisk(2)partition(1)\Windows
anything else i tried said that either there is a hardware problem, or that ntldr is missing. so is it possible to dual boot with vista drive being the system drive?

it was my mistake, i'm sure many of vista users use readyboost and have an usb drive plugged in to one of their usb ports. so do i, and i never take it out, so when i reboot the bios by default mounts the usb drive as a local disk and screws up the whole phisical disk addressing so whatever i have in boot.ini doesn't point to the right disk. the only drive that stays in the same location is the system (boot drive) and that's why vista boots without problems. i noticed this when i tried to repair the xp installation with the cd boot. the usb drive was mounted as disk 1, xp drive as disk 1 as well. weird. anyways after i removed the usb drive from the laptop and rebooted my os choices worked just fine. now my default system is xp and the second choice is vista, both work fine, but vista just doesn't work with a lot of my programs. one great benifit of haveing a dual boot system is that when you get a virus or malware on your xp that modifies something in xp registry, you boot into vista and use an offline registry editor to fix xp. I've made a back up of the rgistry files just incase that ever happens again. cool.

This is a great post. I have been looking all over for something to explain issues dealing with XP-Vista dual boot using 2 separate physical hard drives. I did everything in the initial post, d/l VistaBootPro and got around the new GUI. However initially, Vista would not boot up. I was booting from the XP drive (as default per BIOS). I could boot to XP Home Ed., but when I tried to boot to Vista Home Premium, I got the message, "Could not find \windows\system32\winload.exe". So on a whim, I tried copying \windows\system32\winload.exe from my Vista I: driive to my XP C: drive (same path). Now everthing seems to work.

Any thoughts as to why I had to do this and whether or not there could be other problems resulting from copying this file?
Thanks.

XP Pro SP3 was already installed on the 500, and I installed Vista Ultimate 64 on the 250. I could not, however, get the dual boot menu to come up. If I let the computer boot on its own, it'd boot to Vista. If I told it explicitly in BIOS to boot from the 500, it'd come into XP. If I told it to boot from the 250 - where Vista was installed - I'd get a GRUB error. (Odd - I don't have any flavor of Linux installed ... ?) Now, the problem with this is that, every time I'd boot into XP, I'd need to repair the Vista installation with the install CD. (I think the problem, though, was that bootmgr and the boot directory seem to have been installed to the PATA drive, which I found a little ... odd.)

So, following the directions in this thread, I booted up into XP, found the files (NTDETECT, ntldr, boot.ini, bootmgr and the boot directory), put them on the XP C: drive (the 500), and loaded up VBP. (I have 3.3.0.0)

I went to'Manage OS Entries,' and verified that Vista was set to the 250 drive (E:, when booting in XP) and added 'Windows XP' to boot from C: (the 500, in XP), then Applied Updates.

Reboot.

Ok, so now I get the bootloader, with my two options. If I select Vista, it works fine. If I go to XP, it restarts the computer. If I use the BIOS to select the XP drive, I still get hte bootloader, because that's the drive it resides on. I'm locked totally out of XP now.

Any suggestions? I'm not ready to give up XP yet ... I'm running Vista without entering the license key, to see if I want to keep it or not. If not, then I can still transfer my copy to someone else and not take (so much of) a financial loss on it ...